12 June, 2012

Improved Support for Events

The openSUSE community introduced the Travel Support Program to support travelers to represent openSUSE at conferences and events. A few days ago the team announced a minor change in policy: besides travel costs, the team will also help with costs related to booths, entry tickets and marketing materials.

Entry tickets and booths

While most Free Software events have Free entry - either for everyone or at least for those staffing a booth or giving a talk, this is not always true. Also, some events charge even volunteer organizations for a booth. While we're not too fond of that, reality is one of those things you have to live with and thus this decision - we pay, but up to a reasonable limit.

Marketing materials

Another thing is marketing materials. While we ship tens of thousands of DVD's, flyers, posters and other things around the world each year, sometimes it just doesn't make sense. Sending 100 DVD's with some posters and flyers (worth about 10 bucks) to some countries can easily cost many times the value of what we send. Sometimes, customs give us an extremely hard time and try to charge for the 'value of the software'. In short - we need to be able to produce things locally. And now we can!

The openSUSE ambassadors can pick materials from our well stocked github repo or, of course, modify something there or even create their own.

Now go and spread the word!

Yup, the travel support program is currently just sponsored by SUSE - we haven't figured out (still, I know) how to take donations from others - yet. But if you want to help out financially, talk to me or the travel support team, I'm sure we can work something out!

People person, technology enthusiast and all-things-open evangelist. Previously community manager at SUSE and now at ownCloud while continuing an decade long involvement in the KDE community. Enjoys avoiding traffic and public transport on bike through Berlin, but only when the weather is good. Loves cooking for friends and family and playing with our dog.